Money Legos for Freelancers, DeFi in ETHIndia, Record Lending in July

Happy Monday defiers, hope everyone had a great weekend. Here’s what’s going on in decentralized finance:

• OpenLaw engineer tests new freelance model
• ETHIndia hackathon winners focus on lending
• DeFi lending went parabolic in July

Money Legos for Freelancers

How did you spend your weekend? Ross Campbell, an engineer at legal contracts protocol OpenLaw, experimented with how blockchain technology can change the job market.

Campbell tokenized his legal consulting services using an OpenLaw contract, where 1 RCLE (Ross Campbell Legal Engineering) token equals one hour of legal consultation, and created a pool of those tokens on Uniswap Exchange. Anyone who wanted to retain Campbell’s services can go to the OpenLaw website, type in the amount of RCLE they want to redeem, digitally sign the contract, which Campbell would also sign, and buy RCLE tokens with ETH on Uniswap.

It’s a glimpse of a potential alternative to platforms like Upwork, which take up to 20 percent of the freelancers’ money. In this case, Campbell only paid the few cents of gas fees. Still, for something like this to actually work, there would have to be a jobs marketplace, and the administrators of that platform would probably also take a cut.

The entire process happened over a few clicks and on a mobile phone. Campbell used the OpenLaw platform to create the contract and tokens, the decentralized exchange Uniswap to enable trading of those tokens, and MetaMask’s mobile wallet to connect to the Ethereum blockchain in the process. It’s an example of the “money legos” concept of decentrazlied finance, where users can take different pieces of the ecosystem to build something new.

DeFi in ETHIndia

Decentralized finance dominated the Ethereum hackathon in India over the weekend. Of the six winners, three were lending-related. There was Lendz, for privacy-preserving loans, 1lend.io to aggregate crypto lending across DeFi platforms, and Credeth, an open reputation protocol.

The breadth of the Ethereum community was as impressive as the winners themselves, as is usual in these hackathons. This time, the event attracted over 1,900 applicants of which 175 teams ended up participating, and 68 percent were new to Ethereum, said Abhimanyu Kashyap.

July Was a Record Month for DeFi Lending

Decentralized lending soared last month. A record $106 million was lent out in DeFi platforms tracked by LoanScan in July. Lending in Maker, Compound, Dharma and dYdX, jumped 56 percent from June.

DAI continued to dominate, as more than 70 percent of the loans were taken out in the stablecoin. Compound Finance was the preferred protocol, beating out Maker for the first time. The climbing interest rate on Maker and the ease to switch to Compound with InstaDapp’s bridge could explain the switch.

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